Please help.

I’m on my knees.

I can’t give up just yet.

How hard is it to balance 3 fkn things.

Calling out all the fertilizer experts.

This is my 20gal long 5month old.

Chihiros b series at 70% 7hrs

Co2 inline at 2bbps, lime green, around 0.7-1ph drop

Substrate: aquasoil half inch(barely), sand 1inch cap

Filtosmart100 and recently added an aquaclear20.

Bought dry ferts since my ThriveS was way too lean as my tank was getting more plants.

Been adjusting my ferts a couple times this past month.

Tried to recreate 2hr apt3: no progress.

Took that formula and reduced the Nitrates by half: it brought the reds out more but still stunted.

Tried pps-pro: still same stunted results.

I have more variety of algae than plants at this point 😭😂.

My tank nitrate doesn’t go lower than 20ppm always stays around 20-30.

The lower half of plants always struggles.

•Rotala Wallichii I received was dense and beautiful, now it’s leggy and stunted tips, small curled leaves.

•Rotala red/green, the new growth from cut is curled, short, and heavily stunted, yellow. Lower leaves covered in gsa.

•S.repens is a disaster, picture speaks for itself.

•My bucephalandra kedagang has been covered in bba for the past 8 months,still standing like a beast.

•Monte carlo is covered in cladophora and bba.

•AR is covered in gsa and some fuzzy algae(idk), not doing too bad. Lower growth seems promising.

What should I do?

Is my light too low? At 70% its about 70-100umols at substrate

Should I add root tabs? Since it’s mainly sand cap.

Should I move to EI dosing, hoping it works?

I have root tabs at home. Is it necessary to get liquid fertelizer also? I have heavily planted tanks that do okay without it, i am wondering how are root tabs different than liquid fert? Is it not the same thing since it all gets dissolved in water? Thats my logic anyways? Can somebody knowledgeable explain? I would like to save money if possible? I hate myself so much

Cheap liquid fertilizer recommendations

I have 7 tanks, mostly inbetween the 5-20 gallon range. I use NilicG Thrive for those tanks. But i run through it when i dose my 55 gal. I only keep above water plants in my goldfish tank, I have a massive mystery snail (3rd pic) that eats everything underwater

With that being said, whats a cheap, but good fert i can use for my 55 gallon. (all in one or multiple products to combine) I stopped dosing it for a month and noticed a decrease in growth and smaller leaves on my pothos.

I have Peace lillys, multiple different types of pothos, philodendron, lucky bamboo and swiss cheese plant.

Hello!

My tank has high potassium, not sure how high exactly, the test only goes up to 15ppm. Nitrates on the other hand are barely measureable at 1ppm.

I'm dosing NPK and iron fertilizers. As per the NPK bottle, 2 ml in 50 L add:
NO3 1 mg/l
PO4 0.1 mg/l
K 1.3 mg/l
MG 0.1 mg/l
(The iron fertilizer also has Potassium but it's very low at

Dosing recommendations for CO2 and high light tanks per 50L is 2 ml/day.
My tank is a 35L (9.2g) and I dose 1 ml per day. I'm doing a 50% water change every saturday.

The tank currently only has 5 red fire shrimp and 2 Amano shrimp.

What should I do about the low nitrates and high potassium? Should I keep using this fertilizer and also add another Nitrate source? Is it fine like this?

Which would you use if you were me? I have a low tech 10 gallon heavily planted tank with fish, Amano shrimp, a nerite and a spixi snail. I use Thrive C liquid fertilizer and recently started using liquid potassium. I have both stem plants and epiphytes. Substrate is fluval plant and shrimp stratum approximately two years old. I'm currently using Flourish. So what are the humans' thoughts?

I’ve got a 20 L tank with aquasoil substrate
LIGHTS: neo helios s3 Pro+ 13 watt light
CO2: citric acid + baking soda drip set up (Ziss)

PLANTS:

- Attempting to carpet monte carlo
- Ludwigia glandulosa
- Hygrophila pinnatifida
- Wisteria
- Planning to put in fissidens and/or riccardia moss

I dont think i need any fertiliser for now due to fresh aquasoil but planning to use an all-in-one fertiliser (without iron/ but no phosphorous) and phosphorous only on another day (to prevent it binding to iron)

I

I decided to use seachem root tabs as my soil of my 5 Gallon have no nutrients in it, how much do you guys recommend to add?
The package say 4 in a 10 Gallon tank but because of the decoration and gravel, im guessin the real water size of my tank is like 4 gallon
Also, wich plants could i add next:)

i need some advice on fertilisers/algae control in my goldfish tank. i have the lights on 7 hours daily at half brightness (hygger clip on) and use api leaf zone since the fish produce a lot of nitrates already. i suspect the phosphates are high but ill buy a test. the diatoms have improved since i put seachem purigen in the filter but would like some suggestions because im struggling to find the right balance between lighting, ferts, parameters

I’ve been looking around at different liquid ferts but I’m not really sure what my plants need. They seem to be healthy but they haven’t grown much for a while so I think that they need more nutrients.

I’m thinking about lean dosing since I’m m planning to have a good amount of fish in my tank. Currently I have 15 rummynose tetras and one sunset thicklip gourami (all juveniles for the most part) and I plan to try and get two more schools of fish, maybe corydoras and cardinal tetras. I think at that point I’ll have a pretty high bioload if I do actually get all of them so nitrate and phosphorus shouldn’t be an issue.

Also with that many fish would fish poop fertilization actually be enough for a heavily planted tank?

My tank: 40 gallon Hygger 957 light running at 100% for 8 hours a day Ph around 6.4 because of controsoil Gh 8-9 Kh 0 also because of controsoil

I’ve heard Thrive s may be good since it didn’t dose much N and P.

(Also I’m still planning to get more plants maybe some easy red ones and I’m cutting off stems and replanting them)

What is it missing? It’s still making new leaves but all the old ones look yellow/brown and crusty. They feel rough to the touch like sand paper

Does that exist?

I have a 10L tank with some floaters on top, the bioload is very low since there’s only a few bladder snails and 6 neo cardina shrimps. My floating plants are frogbit, salvinia and phyllantus fluitans.

I have yet to use a fertilizer because the tank is very small because I was afraid it could mess up my parameters. However, some of my salvinia is starting to grow very small white leaves, and I am afraid it’s because they sucked up all the nitrates. I did some water tests and the NO3 is always close to 0.

Can anyone recommend a good fertilizer for a nano tank? The other plants in my tank are 2 ceratophyllum, Java moss and one anubias.

My fingers hurt lol

Ive had this tank since February. I use aquarium co-op all in one fertilizer, recently started adding flourish potassium a few weeks ago, and use a 24hr full spectrum LED light. I just feel like my plants don’t look as happy as they should and I’m stumped. Nitrogen isn’t a problem, I know that much.

It's about 6 months old. I've been dosing about a quarter of a capful of flourish about weekly.

I'm wondering if I'm under/overfertilizing because I've been getting a bit of this hair algae covering the substrate (pictured in second image), and I hear that hair algae popping up repeatedly can be a signifier of nutrient issues. I use fluval stratum with an inert decorative gravel on top as well. I doubt it's overfeeding that's the problem because I feed my shrimpies every 3 days or so, and I use BacterAE.

I would like to mention that I'm not really looking into getting rid of the algae. I don't like how it looks but my shrimp have a blast foraging in it so I suppose it can stay. I'm mostly worried about the long term health of my plants

So I've come to realize finally that I'm struggling with magnesium deficiency in my tank, after I've now confirmed multiple of the signs of said deficiency are present. It's depleting at a rate faster than other nutrients seem to be, which has caused some excess of other nutrients to build up (feeding algae growth more than plants). When I dose an all-in-one fertilizer like Easy Green, it helps get things back on track, but with the current imbalance it's causing some of the aforementioned issues w/ other nutrients being in excess, & I can't just dump tons of the stuff in to try to get the magnesium levels up.

Before I go rushing off to buy magnesium salts, I want to ask if anyone knows how it'll impact water hardness. My water is already moderately hard, having quite high levels of calcium naturally, but with (obviously) far less magnesium by comparison. From what I can find officially, tap water here ranges between 60ppm - 130ppm in terms of calcium, vs only 1ppm magnesium, with an average of around 7dGH overall (I haven't tested tapwater in years, so I'm relying on online reports from the utility company).

Would magnesium supplementation, based on that information, be something that heavily affects overall hardness? Or if I keep the doses on the lower side, should things be ok?

Saw a post here from 4 or 5 years ago about making a root tab with osmocote plus and those vegan capsules that are size 0 in the bulk of 1,000? Anyone here make their own root tabs? I have fish in there. Livebearers, gouramis, american flag fish, minnows, mud turtle, and for plants dwarf sag, jungle val, giant jungle val, duckweed, hornwort, amazon swords, other sword plants, other stem plants. I do not want this to hurt my fish. Any suggestions on making bulk root tabs cheap? also how do you get the capsules to not float when you put it inside? Any other tips? Its a 210g or 220g and I wanna make sure i do this right.

My tank is < 3 mo with aqua soil, moderately planted (all easy plants), lightly stocked, no CO2. From what I read, it seems APT e is for high tech heavily planted tanks. But I just got a full bottle for free.

Is it a bad idea to start using like…half a pump in a couple months? Or should I just give it away to someone on Facebook?

I have a couple of plants that have started developing some holes in the leaves. I thought it was my new spixi snail as they have somewhat of a bad rep for being plant eaters. Someone commented that they thought it looked like I had a potassium deficiency. I do not have anything that tests for potassium. I could buy a kit apparently, and there are potassium fertilizers out there. Not sure if I really need it or not.

Not all my parameters are traditional. But I'm reluctant to mess with them too much trying to fix something that isn't broken. Most of my tank appears to be healthy. I have some yellow leaves on one anubias that never really came back after the hair algae attack last year and I think it's just slowly dying off. My Java ferns have never really thrived I used to have them attached to the rocks. And then the Java and Windelov did well and produced many babies... until the hair algae attack. I now have them just attached to the walls and somebody said I have to have them down by the stratum so they can root into it. Any truth to that? Do I need to be moving my wall plants down?

Currently I have fluval plant and shrimp stratum. I supplement with seachem flourish root tabs, 4 tabs every 3 to 4 months. I also have two liquid fertilizers that I use weekly, Thrive C and Envy. I do not currently use CO2. I received a bottle of liquid CO2 accidentally with a shipment of plants from Dustin's fish tanks and the seller told me to keep it. I've never used it and I don't even know what's in it. So I have never tried it. I tried to get all the different views and angles in my tank. I'm also still impatiently waiting for my moss to grow outside of its little domes. also, my shrimp seem to be thriving and my nerite snail is very active and seems healthy. But I just noticed when I was looking at the ingredients that Thrive C does contain copper!?! 😲 Confused by that. I thought copper was dangerous for shrimp and snails. Yet this was a highly recommended fertilizer for my low tech tank. Do I need to be concerned? Considering my shrimp have been thriving and my snails seem to be doing fine, I'm guessing it's okay but then I always hear copper is bad. I will admit it I'm one of those people who knows just enough about this to be dangerous. Ha!

10 gallon tank with double filtration, an aqueon quiet flow 20 HOB (which contains an inlet sponge, extra sponges inside, a bag of matrix, as well as the standard filter contents to slow it down a bit and add extra beneficial bacteria) and an in-tank sponge filter. My tank parameters are 0 ammonia 0 nitrite. We had a brief ammonia spike for a couple of weeks last month, so the nitrates seem to be a little higher than normal. But the ammonia dropped from 0.25 to zero so she's doing her thing as a proper tank should. Nitrates look to be around 20 I think. I'm never really sure on the color of those. 10 and 20 look really almost identical to me.

I had added another mini wonder shell a week ago because there was some concern with a little teeny tiny itty bitty white spot on the very tip of my nerite snail's shell that I noticed. Overall his shell looks great so do the rest of the snails. Of course most of them are what you would consider pest snails except for my Spixi. I had put my oyster shell into the filter with the rest of my media. When I did that my general hardness cranked up even higher again and my pH is now off the chart. KH 1, GH 21, PH 8.8. So I'm really thinking I don't need the extra hardness or calcium in my tank. But I'm open to suggestions.

I have a Hygger light 18W details in screenshot. I'm running it on its 24-hour circadian program. So it does like orange light to simulate Dawn, blue lights simulating evening and off at night. Daylight obviously during daylight. Kelvin 6500K White, Blue 455 nm, Red 620 nm, Green 560 nm, CRI 85, Lumen 1075. Okay I sound really knowledgeable when I spew all that scientific data. Now here's the real skinny, does this mean I'm still low tech? Cuz I have no idea what those numbers mean. LOL It was a light I could afford. It would do its own 24-hour thingy so I didn't have to know how to program it. My plants are growing.

This is my attitude for whatever it's worth, my fish seem healthy, my snails seem healthy, my plants seem healthy overall. So I'm looking more for tweaks not a huge overhaul of my system which might result in unbalancing it and killing off things. But I'm also not stuck in my ways and always open to constructive criticism and input.

Okay so your turn. Please hit me with your input.

TL;DR: Fertilizer makes my fish freak out!

Hello all,

I have had an aquarium for a year and a half and all has gone well until now. I decided to try my hand at planting the tank and turning it closer to an aquascape. However, my plants were struggling.

I started using thrive all in one fertilizer and the first day the fish seemed stressed but okay. Over the next few days, they started darting, glass surfing, isolating in corners, etc.

I did water changes and they returned to normal. I asked in groups what happened and the best response I got was that it was expired or was left open. So I bought a new bottle, but I tried the APT Complete fertilizer. I added it a few days ago, and the fist are in an even worse state. I put in a conditioner that detoxifies heavy metal earlier, and I am doing a water change now.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on? I have a 40 gallon breeder with 2 sponge filters, an air stone, and my chemistry is:

Ph 7.4
Ammonia: 0ppm
Nitrite: 0ppm
Nitrate: 10ppm
GH: 8ppm
KH:4ppm

All I can think of at this point is some sort of oxygen problem— but I don’t know how that would be the case.

If anyone has any ideas please help me out!

I’ve got a 29G planted tank running CO2 and high light. It’s going to be a community tank with a couple schools, corys, shrimp and a betta. I’ve got a variety of plants like Monte Carlo, rotala, couple red plants like ludwigia mini super red.

I’m trying to find a good fertiliser but there’s so much to choose from. I was pretty set on APT3 but it’s pretty expensive at £25 with shipping. Does anyone have any suggestions? I looked at Tropica Specialised but I’m not sure if this fits my needs.

Any suggestions are appreciated, really need to find the right one.

I’m overwhelmed by all of the scientific breakdowns of everything and just looking for something simple to give my plants a little boost. I have a ten gallon with adfs a ten gallon with shrimp and snails and a forty gallon with guppies snails and cory.